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About LinkBacksRead more."Airborne fulfilment centres" will recharge and refill flying drone delivery craft.
Read more."Airborne fulfilment centres" will recharge and refill flying drone delivery craft.
Reminds me of a diagram I saw in a WW1 textbook...
If this happens then it's only a matter of time before you HAVE to have a paid for licence to fly ANY drone. It's ALL about the $$$$$.
why complain about that? Surely you don't expect to be able to fly a drone for free do you?
All my respect to the first person to steal a dirigible warehouse
"Steal" sounds too naughty. Let's call it "reroute" instead.Originally Posted by Otherhand
oh the humanity..."Steal" sounds too naughty. Let's call it "reroute" instead.
Reminds me of BioShock Infinite!
I cannot envisage deliveries made by drones , utter annoying chaos with drones buzzing around. Might lead to an upsurge in peeps buying air rifles to shoot the bloody things down , could become a new sport. That apart , hacking frequencies and sending these AWOL could be fun I suppose and disgruntled traders that Amazon has ripped off and put out of business might want to re-create " The Hindenburg Disaster " if they did go with an airship warehouse. Still can't see this taking off , excuse the pun.
That, while a tongue-in-cheek comment, does pose an interesting thought. Amazon will presumably intend to use Helium for the obvious avoidance of said Hindenburg-style disaster. Unless anyone's cracked nuclear fusion while I've been laid-out with this bug that means a further -substantial - drain on what is currently a very finite and very important resource. FFS we should be rationing this stuff, and not letting retail companies start use it for dirigibles. Maybe Trump will understand the value of a limited resource and stop this BS pricing that lets us pump it into goofy balloons so it can inevitably leak off into space.
There are meant to be several new helium capture projects coming online soon, the gas industry thinks the price should drop although I believe that when I see it. The gas analysers I work on use helium as a consumable, our lab vents about £100,000 of it to atmosphere a year, even then its not worth capturing the vented gas for rebottling as balloon gas. Low purity helium us actually pretty cheap £20 a bottle, high purity is around £600.
It's cheap because the US set a price cap on it. Despite the fact it is a finite and irreplacable reserve of huge importance (and no alternatives) vital to high-end science, medical and similar applications. It really ought to cost a lot, lot more.
You might want to have a read of this
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworst.../#51c14fc5b701
and
https://www.gasworld.com/russia-heli...009834.article
Because of the increased demand its now become worthwhile extracting He from a wider range of natural gas reserves (where the USA gets its He from, its then stored underground in the national helium reserve), new surveying techniques have also born fruit with a large reserves being identified in Tanzania. Up until recently He was vented at natural gas production facilities, due to its current higher price (10X that of argon) capture and storage is being added where commercially viable. Large users of He are also adding recapture where possible, although you would have to use a hell of a lot to make it viable. One of our customers uses one of these a day
The expectations form BOC/Linde/AirLiquide is that more extraction will come online in the next few years, some will be from existing natural gas reserves, some will be from new reserves that are being targeted because if their high He levels.
You already do if flying it for any commercial or businsss purpose .... though it's not exactly called a licence but amounts to the same thing, and requires more than just paying a fee.
And then they will start giving ads on it
Future is Airy
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